Sep 19, 2010

Youtube and Copyrights

Google is famous for it's creativity and breath-taking technology advancements. They are always on the top, being the first one to introduce almost anything. If something else comes, they acquire it. YouTube is one such technology. Three paypal employees, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim built this in 2005. Sensing the popularity received, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 Billion an year later.

Now it's among the list of most famous entertainment website on the planet, which allows users from all over the world to upload videos. Stats states that more than 100 Million Videos have been watched everyday.

When you allow everyone to post video content, the problem is 'Copyrights'. One will never know whose video is posted by whom. To tackle this, youTube came up with a software system that will AUTOMATICALLY IDENTIFY whether the uploaded content is copyrighted. Here is how it works.

Maintain a database that contains ALL the media ever created over the past 100 years.

When a video is uploaded by a user, scan the database and see if it matches any entry.

Now, does that sound simple? If you think so, you are either dumb or super-human. Think about the size of media worth 100 years. Think about scanning all the videos that are uploaded every second on YouTube. The processing speed of this system is absolutely astonishing. Just got inspired by this talk from a senior google director. I suggest you spend 5 mins in this TED Talk video.